


A Hundred Arms, A Hundred Years

by blesser



Series: The Verger-Bloom Anniversary Tapes [3]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: F/F, Falling In Love, Hannibal Anniversary, Murder Wives, Unexpected feelings, excellent fashion, mild food issues, or more accurately murder girlfriends, overcoming abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-02
Updated: 2018-09-02
Packaged: 2019-07-04 08:54:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15837957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blesser/pseuds/blesser
Summary: “Right,” she looks up properly for the first time, capping her very expensive looking pen, “do you often underestimate women?”“Not at all, I just famously overestimate the psychopathy of men.”***In honour of the three year anniversary of the Murder Wives flying off into the sunset, a Margot-centric character and relationship study set between Apertivo and Digestivo.





	A Hundred Arms, A Hundred Years

**Author's Note:**

  * For [santiago](https://archiveofourown.org/users/santiago/gifts).



> Title from 100 Years by Florence because its the Margot-est

_‘First impressions,’_ Molson Verger would always say, _‘are the smell of meat cooking; they hang around in the air and give you either a sense of appetite or a sense of nausea.’_

As a result, his daughter tries to stick to raw foods. She touches animals lightly, grows up removed from every branch of the family tree, has a room far from the kitchen and internally rankles at the stench of any aspect of the farm or it’s goings on. Every square inch of the building is abhorrent to her. Even after all these years.

It seems a hard life to live, a contrary and bratty life, burning through all this energy in the hopes of defying a dead man.

And yet, his wilful attitude is within her still. Every time she makes aggressive eye contact, judges quickly and bares teeth without question, she is, despite every effort made to shape herself differently, her father’s daughter; cold to the touch, reluctant with compliments, nose turning up fast and judgements flying faster.

The first thing Margot thinks when she sees Doctor Bloom is: _what a horrible car._

In two months time, at a starlit rooftop restaurant in DC, Margot will laugh with genuine delight around a mouthful of parmesan farfalle at an enthusiastic, Fleurie fuelled recount of every story behind every point on Alana Blooms driving license. She will privately cherish the shared memory of pride in the faces of Dr and Dr Bloom –senior, both father and mother- when Alana drove home from the first semester of college in a patched up, second hand, bright green Fuego that cost her every penny and _just barely_ gasped her home across the border.

But that very first day, when they are strangers still and one hundred glances away from moonlit gazing and romantically shared pasta, the car that brings Alana Bloom to Muskrat Farm is nothing more than an ugly disturbance on an otherwise passable morning. It is a nice day, ice cold but clear and East Coast crisp. Margot has shared less than four words with her brother and found herself wonderfully alone on an early ride. As such, she is chalking the day up as a win so far.

Everything since waking has been reduced blissfully to the pound of her heart, hooves on the earth and counting early snowdrops through the tree gaps.

 _In riding a horse,_ Margot recounts to herself as the icy branches whip past them, _we borrow freedom._

It is as close as she can come to imagining peace.

And then the gravel on the drive is churning and Margot’s little tiny corner of the farm is shaken. From  her sanctuary deep in the woods she feels the web being tugged. Hesitantly, she gravitates towards the vibrations but stays out of sight, sticking to the treeline.

After a brief grimace at the visitors’ enormous vehicle, Margot breaks through the trees, keeping her eyes locked ahead. She dismounts and begins setting up defences, raising her hackles and her drawbridge simultaneously. If this is somebody who is falling in with Mason they are, as a natural result, an enemy. Margot watches a heeled boot hit the drive and her automatic second observation about Dr Bloom is: _what a wonderful coat._

This appraisal continues comprehensively albeit grudgingly during their introductions, Margot awards a series of silent congratulations to the Doctors’ face, her grip, her gloves and quick way with words.

*

“This must seem like a trivial conversation.”

“It’s refreshing, to talk about nothing important. I do talk about madness for a living.”

“And I talk _to_ it.”

“Fair point."

"Can I interest you in a period of time where talking is not mandatory?”

“That might be the best line I have ever been served.”

"It wasn't a line Doctor, it was a serious proposition."

"It's three o'clock in the morning."

"Offer still stands. Always."

"You are two states away in a gated mansion armed by Europe's best disgraced personal security."

"I'll leave a knotted rope of bedsheets out of the window for you."

"It's thirty degrees and snowing. Goodnight Margot."

"I'll set fire to the East Wing, draw them away from the service entrance."

"I'm hanging up now."

"All right, all right. I'll wait up for you."

*

Margot kicks and scrapes mud from her boots against the leg of a particularly expensive side table, Russian imported with a mess of rearing bears etched into the gold. A decanter rests ostentatiously on the surface and her fingers itch for its stopper. She chooses to stay alert instead and drifts toward the heavy velvet curtains, listening unobserved to the voices from the veranda.

There was a saying from Molson about being alert around snakes and enemies too, but she can’t be expected to remember them all.

It is with a smile that Margot realises the sound she can hear from outside is her brother choking.

‘-forgiveness isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.’

There is a smile in the words floating through the window.

Odd, Margot thinks as she listens to the new psychiatrist talk about religion and vengeance, to be so familiarly certain about a person she has shared about three minutes with. But Margot is utterly -and against her will- intrigued and charmed. It is something about the whip-smart, hell-hath-no-fury, full red lipped sharpness of this woman that has her itching to move closer to the light of the window.

Mentally shaking herself, she corrects her course at the last second and withdraws back into the funnel web darkness of the hallway, because Margot Verger didn't get this far in life -relatively unscarred- by ignoring her meticulous survival training.

*

  
When Margot finally gets her into bed she is surprised to find that Alana drops her sharp edges at the door, sheds them off with her tweed suit like a second skin.

Despite the impressive silhouette she casts in the light of day, all cutting shoulders and trim waist, straight lines and leather gloves, Alana reveals a form and a touch that are equally soft and generous.

Margot discovers much to her surprise and wonder that this one-woman power-house of revenge and focus likes nothing better than to be overwhelmed. A request Margot exploits happily, trying to keep up as Alana responds deliciously to being crowded into a corner, woken with teeth against her neck, led by the mouth with breath stealing kisses that are consuming them both.

There is always more to unwrap in her, another layer or observation. As a result, pillow talk turns to a sated kind of confessional. Margot finds by drip feed that the good Doctor always has a pen tucked into her hair, drives a half hour detour for La Colombe coffee every morning and can't hold a note to save her life. She runs hot in the night, likes gothic literature as much as 80's movies, craves nothing more than the attention of animals, a drink at the end of the day and to be held through the night.

If Margot was just trying to fuck her, it would be an impossible challenge. This is not a woman who will allow anything less than the full eye contact, jaw cupping, revelation whispering experience.

They are forever forgetting to close the curtains, lost to each other the second their knees hit the mattress. As such, a cold dawn light usually wakes them and Margot often blinks to wakefulness with her arms full of a forgivingly gentle and sated creature. Alana sleeps tucked into the crook of Margot's neck, what's visible of her face so settled and kind the sight makes the scratches on Margot’s back tingle with irony and recalled desire.

*

Two days after their meeting in the stables, when the roads and everything are covered in ice and a fairly typical conversation with Mason leaves her shoulder socket tired and throbbing, Margot takes the I-95 down to the city and navigates a parking space behind the campus library.

It’s a solid guess.

When she finds Alana, sitting in a dim office and pouring over papers, she doesn’t even cast a second glance up at the intrusion, let alone spare any surprise. She simply uses her foot to push a second chair away from the desk and starts talking, pen scratching in time as she speaks, cool as anything.

“This student has written so nonchalantly about the cruelty to the victims’ dog I’ve got one hand on the receiver to at least five profilers.”

“Doesn’t he know that disregard of animal wellbeing is always tipping people off to dormant psychopathic tendencies?”

“She.”

“She,” Margot nods, “sure.”

“Right,” she looks up properly for the first time, capping her very expensive looking pen, “do you often underestimate women?”

Alana looks amused despite the bite and accusation to her words.

“Not at all, I just famously overestimate the psychopathy of men.”

“Woman can’t be dangerous?”

Margot takes the bait and the empty seat offered at the desk. There is a sweater discarded on the arm, plum coloured, enormous, devastatingly soft looking.

“Of course they can. More so, I’d say. But I can still see the-" she picks up the garment, refolds it, shakes it back out again, “potential there maybe.”

Alana looks down at the page, there’s some badly contained smile there, “ _potential <\em>."_

__

“Something like that.”

__

“Less lost causes in the fairer sex? In your opinion. Is that it?”

__

Margot inclines her head but doesn't answer, thinking how unfairly difficult it is to hold a conversation with somebody once you’ve imagined them gasping and wrapped in your own bed sheets. She finds she can’t lift her hand from the sweater, can’t stop imagining it slipping off one shoulder or discarded on the floor.

__

“You know,” Alana, bless her, saves her from response, “this is the first time I’ve seen you outside the halls and corridors of Muskrat.”

__

“And I you.”

__

“Obviously,” she says mildly, standing to reach across the enormous desk for the treasury tags.

__

“It wasn’t difficult to imagine you though, existing out here.”

__

“I’m sure,” she laughs, casual as you like, and shakes the empty box, “up to my eyeballs in grading papers and in a stationery crisis. Why’s that?”

__

“What?”

__

“Why is it easy, to imagine me?”

__

“Well, there was less specificity in regard to, say, office materials, but you always bring a sense of freedom with you from the outside. It makes picturing you with a life all that easier.”

__

“Tracking in the dirt?”

__

“Something far more pleasant.”

__

“Ah. A breath of fresh air?”

__

Alana smiles modestly and throws the empty box over her shoulder; it soars straight into the bin with an impressive thump.

__

“Thank you,” she says when Margot agrees with her silently.

__

“Nice shot,” Margot wonders idly if she should stand too, but she’s so tired from the drive and looking up at Alana is a really pleasant view, “it isn't hard to be a breath of fresh air in a place that's two thirds death and one third dust. Can I ask you an incredibly personal question Doctor Bloom?”

__

Alana takes a considering sip from a half empty mug, it's blue, says _Hoya Saxa_ in chipped letters and must have totally stone cold contents from the grimace on Alana's face.

__

“I think we’re clear past that. Fire away.”

__

“Bad day?”

__

Alana laughs genuinely and freely, but when she looks up her eyes are tired too.

__

“The absolute worst.”

__

When she rounds the desk to put her hands on the arms of Margot’s chair, Margot leans up on her elbows to meet her, drawn up by some invisible thing, some challenge to match that gaze. She can see that Alana is wearing a simple navy suit, so dark it looks black and tailored too sharply. She stops just short of Margot’s face.

__

“My day is looking up though."

__

"Mine too, from where I'm sitting."

__

"Margot-” she says quietly.

__

"Yes?" Margot closes her eyes at the whisper of breath on her face which turns to a sweet little huff against her down turned eyelashes as Alana laughs.

__

"You’re sitting on my coat.”

__

*

__

Alana is proudly consistent, always stays for breakfast, never pins Margot down after the first stumbling incident. She doesn’t snore but breathes so quietly in fact that it makes Margot a little nervous until she discovers that without a doubt, she holds her breath when she comes and always looks all the happier and dizzier for it afterward. Outwardly polite to the point of self-apologising, Alana goes against character and selfishly steals space in the bed and pillows along the way in her sleep. She is ravenous after an orgasm at any time of day and will ask for anything in and out of bed without shame. She seems willing to take and be taken with an equal application of enthusiasm, whether it is in jest or in panting, blindingly satisfying actuality.

__

They fall quickly into an easy sort of rhythm, the kind of relationship built entirely on a lack of deeper knowledge but an immediate connection. When she stays the night at Alana's and they fall asleep after dinner, fully dressed, feet tucked under and talking on the couch, Margot wakes up with a feeling she can only pin down as sudden, blinding, fear. When she voices this panic ridden awareness it is met with a steadied, complentative gaze. Alana, ever the therapist, looks up from where she is trying to slot the jar under the perculator and says, simply and astutely: _I guess you just feel safe._

__

_*_

__

She is sixteen years old and dressed in black.

__

It’s not an unusual look, she has always been a classically maudlin child when it comes to style. It’s easy to dress boring when there’s never anyone, really, to see you. Today’s fitted black tea dress brushes at her knees, little fibres catch the material of her black stockings. She looks like the child of a Spanish orphanage, she feels like a lottery winner in a party dress.

__

“He always said, death is just another way of asking for attention,” Margot says cheerfully, heading to the master kitchen. She knows there is good wine in here and it is thankfully as far from her now late fathers study. If she headed to that wing of house Margot would have to deal with her triumphant heir excuse for a brother, probably with his feet up on the desk and plotting.

__

Margot almost skips through the halls as she plans for the day when she will live alone in this house, paint all the walls and boards white and own nothing in a cage. Idly and non-commitally she pictures her brother slipping his shiny shoes against the edge of the desk, his blonde head cracking against it's equally over polished wood, the whole scene shiny and slick and oh, so sad. She smiles and wishes, with the dirt on her father's coffin freshly thrown, for a whole lifetime without family and at the same time she prays for a whole lifetime of freedom. At sixteen she cannot conceive how one could exist in the same place as the other.

__

A decade later her vows and wishes are being chipped away at and challenged. She isn't putting up much of a convincing fight.

__

*

__

After several weeks, it is clear that Margot is caught and willingly snared. She watches, covertly entranced, as a slender wrist disappears into the arm of a coral suit jacket that shines in the light like crushed mother of pearl. Alana, disappointingly but exquisitely dressed, leans into the bed and kisses Margot's sleepy mouth like a long lost lover. She smells vanillic and soapy like stolen, familiar perfume.

__

It is simple and easy like this morning as often as it isn’t, like last night when Margot can’t stand to be touched without snapping or Alana’s bones scream in protest. Even then, the resulting sprawl across furniture and each other is as natural and comfortable as a the following hot bath they share.

__

Margot had looked at Alana, head was tipped all the way back, ears under, across the steam and the milky froth of the water and tried very hard and in vain _not_ to catalogue all of the things that endear and ensnare her, like the place on Alana’s inner wrist that makes her instantly lose her train of thought or the look on her face when she talks about teaching.

__

Margot is practical but sullen with her creeping feelings, but, like her dear dead father said, first impressions linger. And the lingering here has matured into something that stubborn Margot is unable to ignore: she is slowly, suddenly, inexcusably besotted. She tries to dismiss this with a curt farewell, but Alana looks back at the door with her pink suit and her knowing eyes and just shakes her head, deeply amused.

__

*

__

The dining room is theirs alone. At last. If their brother and employer, respectively, have any idea what is going on between Margot and Alana, he is too conniving or too naïve to expect anything smart from either of them and hasn't referenced it in the slightest. Thank God.

__

The dinner has been long and threatening, the presence of too many men and too many firearms in the room. Margot has been too far from Alana all evening, has not enjoyed all the violent, casually premeditative words falling from that gorgeous mouth.

__

The meal was steak so blue it made Margot's eyes water, she sat for thirty five minutes with it in front of her, the smell of blood permeating every second until the plate was removed without comment. Stubborn as sow bitch, as Mason likes to say, this practiced protest is repeated through dessert and then through coffee.

__

Understandably, Margot is, not for the first or last time in her life, starving. Her very bones ache with hunger, head feels light from the strong, liquid dinner she's been enjoying and, with a wince Margot realises that her hair, up in a high whip-like ponytail, is only making her scalp _scream_.

__

The silence is broken by the far off sound of a door closing, the men's voices start up in the room above and Alana sets her bone handled, serated knife down with a delicate chin. She straightens it unconsciously with her crimson painted fingertips. The dam inside Margot breaks.

__

“My father used to say that company kept is company controlled,” she sighs and feels hours worth of tension fall out of her mouth, “is that what we are doing to you here? What I am-”

__

“-Your father,” Alana interrupts smoothly, like she was expecting it, “sounds like a tyrant and an idiot.”

__

Margot wants to shush her, throw the salt cellar at her or just duck under the table to cower.

__

“You shouldn’t be afraid of him any more than you’re afraid of me,” Alana runs an idle teaspoon around the remnants of her dessert bowl like she is nonchalantly stirring tea, not asking for the impossible.

__

About five grandfather clocks start up a witching hour chorus around the house.

__

“In fact,” Alana’s lips are wet pink with compote as she lowers the spoon, Margot can imagine the taste of it, saccharine and moreish, and her tongue throbs in sympathy and want, “you probably have more to fear from me. Which is to say, nothing at all.”

__

_I have never been so petrified of anyone in my life and fear raised me,_ Margot thinks, _it parented me relentlessly and brought me up tough and hard._

__

“Well," she says instead, "being that you are one, alive and two, not planning to endanger me –I hope- then I think you are probably right.”

__

Margot doesn't bother to shield her expression of hope and begging as she looks across the table.

__

“Come here,” Alana says, hands stretching out across the yawning mahogany void between them, “come here and take down your hair and come with me up to bed.”

__

*

__

Sometimes Margot will get up three times to check the lock on the bedroom door once they are inside and Alana is asleep. Sometimes she checks in the middle of love making, Alana watching with hot eyes from the bed or trailing along too with their legs entangling and hips bumping against the door. These frantic instances have Margot reaching blindly behind her body for the lock and trying to concentrate on security and silence and something other than the pinch of teeth on her lower lip.

__

Other times they touch each other on the balcony or the veranda at dusk or once against the kitchen counter with wine in their blood and hands mindlessly petting all over one anothers’ clothes. In these moments they are brazen and stupid. Foolishly in love.

__

*

__

Dr Bloom seems like the type of person who has always enjoyed puzzles. Margot imagines her as the annual untangler of festive string lights and the eager seating plan coordinator at difficult functions, a problem solver, a code cracker and a tireless unraveller.

__

Margot, a diagnosed enigma herself, has felt the burn of that gaze a few times across the room and the pillow like she can hear the gears turning.

__

She tips her face into the path of that appraising look, stretching her arms Sunday slow across the bed.

__

“You are trying to get under my skin.”

__

It’s not a question, or an accusation. Alana definitely doesn’t deny it. She just flips the satin sheets around her ears and sets to work at a torturous pace demonstrating exactly how efficient she is at getting under someone, inside of them, chipping away at Margot with a pressure that leaves her eyes wet and brain scurrying away, blinking against a hard won pleasure.

__

Alana moves back up her trembling body with a smile, as though she has figured Margot out, solved the equation. Margot tries with pathetic sort of desperation to find the result, as though she can kiss the answer from the tip of her tongue.

__

And Alana somehow with her steely soft eyes and fingers, her gentle heart and mouth tells her over and over and over.

__

**Author's Note:**

> Jeez Margot, in love much?


End file.
